Women’s absence from accounts of American architectural history has been a longstanding problem. In 2017, the Pioneering Women of American Architecture website was launched with the goal of documenting and publicizing women’s contributions to the built environment in the United States. As part of the Glass House Presents Series, project co-editors Mary McLeod and Victoria Rosner, together with contributor Michael Kubo, will talk about their work on this timely project and the challenges of writing women back into American architectural history.

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture history and theory. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She has written extensively on Le Corbusier’s architecture and urban planning, and is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living. She is also the co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, as well as the new website Pioneering Women of American Architecture.

Victoria Rosner is Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia University School of General Studies and teaches in the Columbia University Department of English and Comparative Literature. Rosner is the author, most recently, of Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), as well as Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2005), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. She is editor of the web-based archive Pioneering Women of American Architecture and two books, The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge UP, 2014) and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia UP, 2012; with Geraldine Pratt).

Michael Kubo is assistant professor of architectural history and theory at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. He is co-editor of OfficeUS: Atlas (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015) and coauthor of Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston. His writing has appeared in publications including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Bauhaus Magazine and Architect.

Glass House Presents is an ongoing series of talks, performances, and other live events that extend the site’s historic role as a gathering place for artists, architects, and other creative minds. This talk is supported in part by Connecticut Humanities and the New Canaan Community Foundation.

Co-presented by the New Canaan Museum and Historical Society and October4Design.

Thursday October 22, 7:00pm
This is a virtual event.

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